Issue #40

Aug 28 2014

Editor Picks

The Plan to Build a Massive Online Brain for All the World’s RobotsToday, backed by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, Saxena and his team unveiled what they call RoboBrain, a kind of online service packed with information and artificial intelligence software that any robot could tap into...

The Data Scientist on a Quest to Turn Computers Into DoctorsSome of the world’s most brilliant minds are working as data scientists at places like Google, Facebook, and Twitter—analyzing the enormous troves of online information generated by these tech giants—and for hacker and entrepreneur Jeremy Howard, that’s a bit depressing...

The Role of Chief Data Officer in the 21st CenturyFifteen years after enterprise resource planning and over two decades into data warehousing, many business executives are still frustrated over their inability to trust their company's data One big reason for this continuing data chaos is that companies do not manage their data as a business asset, and there is no one watching the store. In this Executive Report, we look at the role of chief data officer and why this role is so important...

Machine learning teaches me how to write better AIWriting AI to play games is a special kind of crack for me. Seeing my AI face off against other people - or better yet, AIs written by other people! It’s so… I don’t know how to describe it. I cannot resist its siren call...

Practical Lessons from Predicting Clicks on Ads at FacebookWith over 750 million daily active users and over 1 million active advertisers, predicting clicks on Facebook ads is a challenging machine learning task. In this paper we introduce a model which combines decision trees with logistic regression, outperforming either of these methods on its own by over 3%, an improvement with significant impact to the overall system performance...

Automatic Storytelling: Or, How to Build Your Very Own Data ScientistUnfortunately, the process of analyzing data and compiling interesting results can be very time consuming. Even so, after telling these stories many times, some patterns emerge in the data analysis and communication of the findings. This led the data science team at Chartbeat to ask the question: Can we build an automated data scientist that can seek out interesting stories within our data?...

How the Napa Earthquake Affected Bay Area Sleepers
The South Napa Earthquake was the strongest to hit Northern California in 25 years. Our data science team wanted to quantify its effect on sleep by looking at the data recorded by Jawbone UP wearers in the Bay Area who track their sleep patterns...

Mood for Music: Emotion Recognition on Acoustic Features
Our emotional response to a music fragment depends on a large set of external factors, such as gender, age, culture, and context. However, these external variables set aside, humans consistently categorise songs as being happy, sad, enthusiastic or relaxed. We’ve developed an algorithm that knows how a song will be emotionally perceived. ...

On Machine Learning
My aim is not to focus on the algorithms, methods or classifiers but rather to offer a broader picture on how to approach a machine learning problem, and in the meantime give some advice...

3x faster convolutions in Theano
Convolutional neural networks (convnets) are all the rage right now. Training a convnet on any reasonably sized dataset is very computationally intensive, so GPU acceleration is indispensible. In this post I’ll show how you can use the blazing fast convolution implementation from Alex Krizhevsky’s cuda-convnet in Theano....

Jobs

SumAll is a connected data tool that helps thousands make better decisions using data. As a Data Engineer you will be part of the Data Products group. You will be working closely with other Data Scientists, Integration Engineers, Product Engineers, and Designers to help develop our flagship analytics application. Your main responsibility will be to help develop software and systems to mine data for trends, patterns, and insights that can be delivered to our users...